Nicolas Ducheneaut

From Tree House to Barracks: The Social Life of Guilds in World of Warcraft.

A representative sample of players of a popular massively multiplayer online game (World of Warcraft) was interviewed to map out the social dynamics of guilds. An initial survey and network mapping of players and guilds helped form a baseline. Next, the resulting interview transcripts were reviewed to explore player behaviors, attitudes, and opinions; the meanings they make; the social capital they derive; and the networks they form and to develop a typology of players and guilds. In keeping with current Internet research findings, players were found to use the game to extend real-life relationships, meet new people, form relationships of varying strength, and also use others merely as a backdrop. The key moderator of these outcomes appears to be the games mechanic, which encourages some kinds of interactions while discouraging others. The findings are discussed with respect to the growing role of code in shaping social interactions.

E-mail as habitat: an exploration of embedded personal information management

Email has become more like a habitat than an application. It is used for a wide range of tasks such as information management and for coordination and collaboration in organizations. Our research shows that email is the place in which a great deal of work is received and delegated and is a growing portal for access to online publications and information services. It has become the place where PC users spend much if not most of their workdays (the application is always on, and is often the focus of attention). This, and the burgeoning quantities of messages and attachments that email delivers to people each day, has led users to co-opt it as a personal information management (PIM) tool. In fact this simply follows from what we have found to be a common tendency of knowledge workers, which is toembed personal information management directly into their favorite workspaces .

Taking email to task: the design and evaluation of a task management centered email tool

Email has come to play a central role in task management, yet email tool features have remained relatively static in recent years, lagging behind users? evolving practices. The Taskmaster system narrows this gap by recasting email as task management and embedding task-centric resources directly in the client. In this paper, we describe the field research that inspired Taskmaster and the principles behind its design. We then describe how user studies conducted with ?live? email data over a two-week period revealed the value of a task-centric approach to email system design and its potential benefits for overloaded users.

The Proteus Effect: Implications of Transformed Digital Self-Representation on Online and Offline Behavior

Virtual environments allow individuals to dramatically alter their self-representation. More important, studies have shown that people infer their expected behaviors and attitudes from observing their avatars appearance, a phenomenon known as the Proteus effect. For example, users given taller avatars negotiated more aggressively than users given shorter avatars. Two studies are reported here that extend our understanding of this effect. The first study extends the work beyond laboratory settings to an actual online community. It was found that both the height and attractiveness of an avatar in an online game were significant predictors of the players performance. In the second study, it was found that the behavioral changes stemming from the virtual environment transferred to subsequent face-to-face interactions. Participants were placed in an immersive virtual environment and were given either shorter or taller avatars. They then interacted with a confederate for about 15 minutes. In addition to causing a behavioral difference within the virtual environment, the authors found that participants given taller avatars negotiated more aggressively in subsequent face-to-face interactions than participants given shorter avatars. Together, these two studies show that our virtual bodies can change how we interact with others in actual avatar-based online communities as well as in subsequent face-to-face interactions.

Socialization in an Open Source Software Community: A Socio-Technical Analysis

Open Source Software (OSS) development is often characterized as a fundamentally new way to develop software. Past analyses and discussions, however, have treated OSS projects and their organization mostly as a static phenomenon. Consequently, we do not know how these communities of software developers are sustained and reproduced over time through the progressive integration of new members. To shed light on this issue I report on my analyses of socialization in a particular OSS community. In particular, I document the relationships OSS newcomers develop over time with both the social and material aspects of a project. To do so, I combine two mutually informing activities: ethnography and the use of software specially designed to visualize and explore the interacting networks of human and material resources incorporated in the email and code databases of OSS. Socialization in this community is analyzed from two perspectives: as an individual learning process and as a political process. From these analyses it appears that successful participants progressively construct identities as software craftsmen, and that this process is punctuated by specific rites of passage. Successful participants also understand the political nature of software development and progressively enroll a network of human and material allies to support their efforts. I conclude by discussing how these results could inform the design of software to support socialization in OSS projects, as well as practical implications for the future of these projects.

The social side of gaming: a study of interaction patterns in a massively multiplayer online game

Playing computer games has become a social experience. Hundreds of thousands of players interact in massively multiplayer online games (MMORPGs), a recent and successful genre descending from the pioneering multi-user dungeons (MUDs). These new games are purposefully designed to encourage interactions among players, but little is known about the nature and structure of these interactions. In this paper, we analyze player-to-player interactions in two locations in the game Star Wars Galaxies. We outline different patterns of interactivity, and discuss how they are affected by the structure of the game. We conclude with a series of recommendations for the design and support of social activities within multiplayer games.

Body and mind: a study of avatar personalization in three virtual worlds

An increasingly large number of users connect to virtual worlds on a regular basis to conduct activities ranging from gaming to business meetings. In all these worlds, users project themselves into the environment via an avatar: a 3D body which they control and whose appearance is often customizable. However, considering the prevalence of this form of embodiment, there is a surprising lack of data about how and why users customize their avatar, as well as how easy and satisfying the existing avatar creation tools are. In this paper, we report on a study investigating these issues through a questionnaire administered to more than a hundred users of three virtual worlds offering widely different avatar creation and customization systems (Maple Story, World of Warcraft, and Second Life). We illustrate the often-surprising choices users make when creating their digital representation and discuss the impact of our findings for the design of future avatar creation systems.

Activity-based serendipitous recommendations with the Magitti mobile leisure guide

This paper presents a context-aware mobile recommender system, codenamed Magitti. Magitti is unique in that it infers user activity from context and patterns of user behavior and, without its user having to issue a query, automatically generates recommendations for content matching. Extensive field studies of leisure time practices in an urban setting (Tokyo) motivated the idea, shaped the details of its design and provided data describing typical behavior patterns. The paper describes the fieldwork, user interface, system components and functionality, and an evaluation of the Magitti prototype.

Building an MMO With Mass Appeal: A Look at Gameplay in World of Warcraft

World of Warcraft (WoW) is one of the most popular massively multiplayer games (MMOs) to date, with more than 6 million subscribers worldwide. This article uses data collected over 8 months with automated “bots” to explore how WoW functions as a game. The focus is on metrics reflecting a player’s gaming experience: how long they play, the classes and races they prefer, and so on. The authors then discuss why and how players remain committed to this game, how WoW’s design partitions players into groups with varying backgrounds and aspirations, and finally how players “consume” the game’s content, with a particular focus on the endgame at Level 60 and the impact of player-versus-player-combat. The data illustrate how WoW refined a formula inherited from preceding MMOs. In several places, it also raises questions about WoW’s future growth and more generally about the ability of MMOs to evolve beyond their familiar template.

What a to-do: studies of task management towards the design of a personal task list manager

This paper reports on the results of studies of task management to support the design of a task list manager. We examined the media used to record and organize to-dos and tracked how tasks are completed over time. Our work shows that, contrary to popular wisdom, people are not poor at prioritizing. Rather, they have well-honed strategies for tackling particular task management challenges. By illustrating what factors influence task completion and how representations function to support task management, we hope to provide a strong foundation for the design of a personal to-do list manager. We also present some preliminary efforts in this direction.